dwheraldhbfandomcom-20200215-history
Writer's guide
Anyone can write, but... As the material from this wiki is going to be used as the Kingdom's handbook, it would be nice to be able to credit those good gentles who contribute so, please before making your contributions do create a wikia account through which you can be credited in the material produced. Copyright issues By writing to this wiki, one grants that the copyright for reproducing the material in the publications of the Kingdom of Drachenwald. Same goes for picture uploading to this wiki. Anything uploaded is freely usable in future publications of Drachenwald. This probably needs mentioning too, don't upload such images that you do not have power granting the copyright for our publishing. A shortish style guide for the content writers This handbook is not only meant to contain a lot of information relevant to heralds in relation to one aspect or another of the field, but it is intended to be an inspiration and encouragement. Consequently what is wanted is not only education and informing, but education and informing provided in a tone that makes a new person want to become a herald, want to be a part of the college and see the fun doing this heraldry thing is for us. Hence it is a good idea to bear a few things in mind as we write the content. *When people are told to do something, we should never forget to tell whys and wherefores. For example instead of a curt "every herald reports quarterly" we should aim for explaining how reporting is a way of communication between the officers, what it allows and means for the superior officer and what it can give to the herald making the report. *Don't be afraid of length. The bits we write here are free and the material can be edited to shorter form if necessary when producing the hard copy version. So bang away with glee, use anecdotes, start the story from comparisons with the ancient romans if you feel like it. *There are couple of things that should be kept to minimum that is demands and prohibitions. This material is for existing and prospective volunteers and these kind of approaches don't serve such people well and can easily slash their enthusiasm. This is something that would be counterproductive to the intentions of this book and why these practices should be avoided if humanly possible. **If it is necessary to state prohibitions or demands to the practices of the heralds, these should be well explained and argumented. "We do this because...", "we don't do that as..". Such explanations don't need to be short, on the contrary feel free to do that in length. *If a thing a can be done in a number of ways, it would be good if we could cover at least some more than one of them. If that for one reason or another can not be done we should at least express that there are more than one way of doing it. E.g. Court reporting can be done through a web form or a by email. The reports can be kept short or written long, and how these ways have different impacts. Some short and sweet technical guidance The wiki here is based on MediaWiki, which means that the editing if not using the WYSIWYG / Visual editor is done using the MediaWiki syntax. You can have a peek at the existing pages on how this works, but along the line you will probably benefit from having a nice cheat sheet handy. Here is the one from Wikipedia. Category:meta